Art from Nature

"The great difficulty of my whole career as a painter is that what I love most . . . holds little of interest for most people ... I love the approach of winter, the retreat of winter, the change from snow to rain and vice versa, the decay of vegetation and the resurgence of plant life in the spring. These to me are exciting and beautiful, an endless panorama of beauty and drama, but . . . the mass of humanity remains either bored and indifferent or actually hostile."

Thus Painter Charles Burchfield confided to his journal the self-doubts that have tormented him throughout his career. Last week Manhattan's Whitney Museum gave convincing proof of just how wrong Watercolorist Burchfield could be. The museum's major retrospective showing of 114 Burchfield paintings and sketches rated a resounding critics' salute and established him, at 62, as the greatest living U.S. watercolorist.

Hobgoblin Mood. Burchfield's love for nature grew naturally out of his boyhood in Salem, Ohio. The woods, fields and swamps on Salem's outskirts were his favorite refuge, where he found a private world overlaid with hobgoblin moods, hints of dark, mysterious forces and occasional lyrical sunbursts of delight. But his first struggling attempts to set down this world of nature met with little popular success. Ever self-doubting, Burchfield decided to turn to realistic paintings of the world of man.

Burchfield discovered the scenes that first made him famous in the back streets and industrial areas of Buffalo, where he took a job as a wallpaper designer, worked on art in his spare hours. By the time he decided to devote himself full time to his art, his realistic scenes of grim train yards, black iron drawbridges, rows of workers' unpainted houses had put him in the forefront of the American Scene painters of the 1930s. But as one critic quipped, Burchfield, with his prevailing gloomy mood (see cut above), seemed too often like Painter Edward Hopper on a rainy day.

It was not until 1943 that Burchfield began to find his way home again. One day, while mounting work from his Ohio days, Burchfield suddenly decided to use his early sketches as a starting point, expand them in his old lyric style. The attempt, he wrote, released "a long-pent-up subconscious yearning to do fanciful things, and once started, it seemed to sweep onward like a flooded stream; there was no stopping it." An example of Burchfield's new-found freedom is Summer Afternoon (opposite), started as a sketch in 1917 and completed as a watercolor in 1948. The finished scene shows Little Beaver Creek, Burchfield's boyhood swimming hole, capturing with almost Van Gogh-like intensity his own feeling of "the ineffable peace of a quiet summer day in those far-off times. All things seem to look at and yearn toward the sun."

Final Harvest. Recently, Burchfield has thrown off his former dependency on his early sketches, found his inspiration directly in nature. One of his best is Oncoming Spring (opposite), a triumphal rendering of a theme that had been germinating in his mind since 1915. In a rapturous letter Burchfield described the final harvest: "Hardly had I set up my easel when a thunderstorm came up. I decided nothing was going to stop my painting, and hurriedly got my huge beach umbrella and my raincoat. I protected my legs with a portfolio, the wind holding it in place. And so I painted with my nose almost on the paper, with thunder crashing, boughs breaking and rain falling in torrents. A glorious few hours when I seemed to become part of the elements. When I was done at late afternoon, the picture was complete. It seemed as if it had materialized under its own power."

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